#AtoZChallenge Valentine's Day Massacres

Not all love stories end Happily Ever After.  These are some blood-soaked love stories, mostly from MST3K, though at least one is on Rifftrax.

The Brute Man:  I said about a year ago that I don't think it's really that bad of a movie.  It's from the 50s and is about a guy named Hal who had a promising football career until his face is badly damaged in a chemistry lab accident.  Years later "the Creeper" starts to track down and kill those he feels are responsible.  While fleeing the cops he ducks in the apartment of a blind woman who doesn't fear him because she can't see his damaged face.  To prove his love he murders a jeweler to steal a brooch.  Ultimately his love proves to be his Achilles heel as the cops use the woman as bait to trap him.  Like I said about a year ago if they'd treated this as something other than a B movie it might have been decent.

The Indestructible Man:  The Indestructible Man is actually pretty destructible.  I mean he is killed at the end of the movie so I guess the title was a misnomer.  Lon Chaney is a death row inmate who's revived and goes on a killing spree while trying to recover some money he hid after a robbery.  His Achilles heel is his stripper girlfriend whom a cop pumps for information that leads to the Indestructible Man's destruction.

Tormented:  This is another one I don't think is all that bad so much as it's just old.  It was made back in the 50s and is about a guy who was up in a lighthouse with his mistress when she fell to her death.  Maybe he could have saved her, but he hesitated and so she died.  Later he's engaged to be married and is back near the scene of the crime and like The Telltale Heart he's haunted by her--literally!  This one used to be on Hulu until they got rid of all their MST3K episodes so I didn't see it for a while until they showed it on Pluto TV.  It was made by Bert I Gordon who made a lot of other MST3K fare, mostly shlocky monster movies like Beginning of the End.  He tried to add some film noir to his repertoire and it comes out as weak sauce.  In the hands of a better director it probably would have worked.  The lamest part is that since apparently they couldn't film near any of the thousands of lighthouses in America (many of which I've visited) they just took like a postcard of a lighthouse and put it in the background for scenes of the lighthouse, the same effect Gordon used in his shlocky monster movies.

Ruby:  This is one of those Rifftrax ones that's only sometimes on Amazon Prime so I haven't seen it a lot.  The plot doesn't really make much sense as this woman named Ruby had a boyfriend who was murdered back in the 30s or something.  Like 20 or 30 years later she's running a drive-in movie theater where apparently all the murderers are working.  So she starts murdering them.  Because I guess revenge is a dish best served like 20-30 years later.  If the plot made sense and there were better actors and, basically everything else, it wouldn't be so bad.  So, OK, it's just bad.

Now, can't you feel the love?